Journey's Weekly Homilies

Christmas Eve
December 24, 2002
by Tom Kinzie

Isaiah 9:1-6
Titus 2:11-14
Luke 2:1-14

Just a few weeks ago a co-worker and I were speaking with a Cuban man, a refugee to this country.  The refugee started to describe an absolutely horrendous series of events that involved his family.  And part of this man’s pain is that his family is in another country, so that he was not able to stop the events from happening or to help now.  The grief was just palpable in the small interview room.  As we walked out I said, almost as an exhalation, that there is such suffering in the world.  My co-worker said, and that is why I do not believe in God.  Then I said, and that is why I do.

I don’t want to give any impression of superiority or one-ups-manship in my response.  This co-worker is the very model of compassion and generosity and I admire her very much.  Rather, it is simply to say that in my world there must be a God, there must be a sacred center of things.  I cannot imagine my life, the life of the world without such a belief.  But if there is a God in this world, then God must often have a broken heart for all the anguish that is here.

I was in the eighth grade when Edgar Woods came to Tonasket, a very small town of 958 persons.  He was to be the new pastor at the Community Church.  He was a graduate of the Yale Divinity Schools.  It certainly never happened before or since that an Ivy League seminarian came to Tonasket.  Why he had I couldn’t say.  There had never been a preacher like him in my small town.

I remember the first time I saw him light up a cigarette.  Wow, I thought, a pastor who smokes.  Not just smokes either.  One Saturday afternoon five young people piled into his car to make the three and a half-hour drive to Seattle for a classical guitar concert. After the concert he drove us to a well known Chinese restaurant and, in what I considered in those days to be a very sophisticated and worldly manner, ordered all the food and a couple of martinis besides.  A minister who smokes and drinks.  This was great stuff to me back then.

Once he was helping me put on snow skis.  I was new to skiing and I was sliding all over the place.  I could not get my feet still enough to attach my boots to the skis.  In exasperation Rev. Woods issued forth a loud yell that involved Jesus’ name and his messianic title.  Smokes drinks, and swearing.

You have to understand that it didn’t take too much in Tonasket to seem worldly, wise, and eccentric, particularly as a pastor.  This was exciting stuff to an impressionable teenager.  My own Brethren church had something else in mind for pastors.  Pastors were to be public symbols of our desire for sanctity.  Our pastors were upright, careful, perhaps a little severe.  They were persons who probably would not so much as play cards in public, at least not without careful ethical scrutiny.

Once a year the Brethren and the community church folks would gather for a midnight Christmas Eve Service.  I always went to these services when I came home from college or jobs because it was there that I could meet old classmates and friends, sing the great songs, and eagerly anticipate the next day’s festivities.  The services themselves were often drab and boring affairs.  Unmemorable, really, except one Christmas Eve service I will never forget.

It began like all of the others.  And standing in front of us was Rev. Woods and Rev. Hiser, the somewhat dour and rigid pastor of the Church of the Brethren.  These services were always held in the Brethren church because we actually had a pipe organ there and at that time a fairly new church building.  The service was well on it way and Rev. Woods was reading one of the biblical passages, maybe even one of the ones we have read tonight.  In the middle of this reading in walks four people, not part of either of our churches (everyone knew that immediately).  They smelled a bit like they had already begun to celebrate, and they kept moving, a bit clumsily and noisily, right up the central aisle of the sanctuary.  No one knew what to do.  The service had already begun and these four folks walked all the way to the front of the Church, in front of God and everyone else, and knelt before the communion table and crossed themselves.  They were not only inebriated they were Catholics.  Which was the greater affront to our Christmas Eve service was debatable.

At this point Ed Woods did something truly pastoral.  The rest of us were paralyzed by our conventions, worrying and wondering what we should do.  I could see knots of concern and protectiveness on the faces of some of the Brethren ushers.  The possibility of someone forcibly escorting these strangers out of our church seemed not unlikely.  But here Ed Woods stopped reading.  He came down to where the four were kneeling, talked to them a bit, explained what was going on, gave them a bulletin with the order of service, and walked them to a pew -- the first pew, the one in front of
everyone.  It was that simple.  It was a gesture acknowledging their humanity.  It was an act of generosity and hospitality.  So, it was the most Christmas thing that could happen on that night, that holy night.

Just behind the Church of the Brethren property line there lay a field of tumbleweed and sagebrush, so stark in contrast to the irrigated green of the church lawn.  And just up that hill, not far from the church lawn, was a small chapel.  When I was young, the church boys would go into that church and investigate what remnants were left—a few hymnals, a beat up foot pump organ, and a small crucifix.  I have no idea when that chapel was worshipped in, but I did know it had been a Catholic chapel for local Native Americans.   How odd now to remember that we boys often played cowboys and Indians there, using the remains of the chapel as a hiding place for our games.

I need to say that the four folks who came into our Christmas Eve service, the ones Ed Wood made welcome, were Native Americans.  We did not use such words then.  Maybe they knew people who had worshipped at that small chapel.   Maybe, I have thought lately, some invisible, inaudible bell from that chapel had called to the four guests.  Perhaps, they had been beckoned to that Christmas Service for some reason…with Ed Woods to announce to us the good news that the sign of the Christ child in this world is still a sign of welcome and generosity to the outsider, to the disenfranchised, the different, the other.

It would have to be a simple and human gesture that offered welcome to the stranger. The story of the Christ child is about a gesture offered to a stranger, a manger, at least, where there is no bed.  It is a kind and welcoming word in a world where too often the stranger is more to be feared than welcomed.  The sign of the Christ child begins to reveal that when we are most human and welcoming to one another we are closest to God.  It means that when we honor the human child we honor the God, the sacred presence that is in each person.  The sign of the Christ child show us that there are measureless and unpredictable ways that we can open our hearts to one another.  To say all of this is simply to say that the sign of the Christ child is the way of love.

The paradox here, among so many, is that in this tiny, human symbol, God is exposed to us not as powerful, but as fragile -- as are our hearts when we truly become present and available to one  another.  The sign of the Christ child is powerful, but it is not the power of empire, it is not the power of a dogmatic religious truth that stretches out to eternity.  The power of the Christ child is a power that is inside out, from within us to what is outside of us.  There are no guarantees that our hearts will not be broken.  There is every reason to believe that God’s heart is broken again and again
for us.  The Christ child, the one who is God in our midst, is the sign that this is so.

So may this Christmas bring us whatever we need to be love for one another—tears, joy power, gentleness, courage, what ever it is we need.  And may this silent night of our hearts be filled with the presence of God.